Quantum Conundrum Review – Shift Dimensions to be Charmed by Gameplay

Quantum Conundrum
Developer: Airtight Games
Price: $15.00
Platform: PC [Reviewed], XBLA, PSN

Quantum Conundrum is visually charming and feels like a 3D animated children’s movie. The gameplay is fun and engaging, however it doesn’t live up to expectations with is weak short narrative, riddled with puns.

The marketing of this game seems to be centered around Airtight Games’ creative lead, Kim Swift, who is known for being a lead designer of Valve’s Portal. It is impossible to play this game without making connections to what many call the best series of first person puzzle games.

Where Portal and Quantum Conundrum align are in the basic mechanics, pressing red buttons, putting weights on top of pressure sensitive mechanisms to open doors while using science and  and progress. However that is where the similarities end.

The core gameplay of Quantum Conundrum is manipulating the different dimensions to make objects heavier. The player controls a 12-year-old silent protagonist who is visiting his uncle’s  house for the summer.

All of the story is delivered through the voice of the boy’s uncle, Professor Fitz Quadwrangle who is voiced by John de Lance (famous for his role as Q in the older Star Trek films).

The professor is trapped in an unknown dimension and is giving instructions to his nephew to help get things back to normal.

The voice acting is strong, and the lines are well delivered, but I found the writing to be very shallow and not offer much in the form of a rewarding experience. The jokes had me rolling my eyes at the constant bombardment of puns throughout every level of the game.

Simply put, the story is lacking, and disappointing and falls very short of the high standards the Portal series has set for the environmental first person puzzle genre.

Forget about the story, this game has some fresh physics mechanics which will shift the way players have to think in order to solve puzzles. The game starts out giving the player control of only one dimension, the fluffy dimension. When this mode is active, all objects become very light and objects that were once too heavy to move, are easily lifted and thrown across the room. The difficulty starts out very easy in an effort to familiarize players with the different manipulable objects in the game.

Throwing a fluffy safe at a glass window wont do anything, but if the player changes back to the normal dimension while the safe is en-route it will continue on its path and shatter the glass.

The game has three other dimesions which can be controlled by a player when the puzzle allows it. The heavy dimension turns everything into thick metal objects that cannot be destroyed by lasers.  The slow motion dimension slows everything within the environmental to a crawl. The final dimension is the reverse gravity dimension which makes up down, and down up.

Some puzzles have dimensions shifting and changing on a timer, while others give full control to the player, who is not effected by dimensional shifts thanks to the magical science glove which controls the changes.

My favorite of the dimensions is slow motion. This allows players to throw an object, slow it down before it travels too far, and hop on top and go for a ride.

I completed the game in just under four hours, but it does become quite challenging towards the end, where the puzzles require faster timing control of the dimension shifts.

The visual style of this game is wonderful. Bright colors with simple textures and environments that are very simple, yet very dynamic because the environment (including the contents of portraits hanging on the wall) changes to match the dimension that the player is in. It’s an aesthetic that feels like a cartoon where anything is possible.

The game does not penalize the player for death, and is surprisingly where I found some of the funniest moments of the game. On every death screen the player is show an item from a list of “things you will never experience” as a result of dying.

DLC is planned for the game, and a season pass is being offered on Steam for $19.99 which includes the first two content packs and the games soundtrack.

The Final Word
Quantum Conundrum’s story does not rival that of the Portal games, but it’s gameplay is a fresh entertaining experience all on its own. Through the controlling of dimensions the feeling of satisfaction is prominent even when the simplest of puzzles are solved. And while the core of the game is only four hours long, it is certainly worth the $15 price of admission.

– MonsterVine Rating: 4 – Good